Court Orders

Los Angeles police officers served injunctions against 75 members of the Culver City Boys gang over the weekend in an effort to crack down on the Mar Vista-area gang that has been implicated in a wave of deadly shootings in Santa Monica last fall. The court orders prohibit the gang members, including 23 juveniles, from associating with each other in public, using pagers, engaging in harassment and intimidation of others, and damaging or defacing property within a specific area.

TEXAS A man who disrupted a speech being given by former President Bush should be tried for heckling, a court in Austin ruled. Thomas Markovich was a university student in 1998 when he stood up in the House gallery and yelled at Bush, who was speaking as part of the Texas Book Festival. Markovich's attorney, Kenneth Houp, said the outburst was prompted by a reference to Nicaragua Bush had made in his speech.

A French court has ordered British Airways to pay cash damages to 61 French passengers who were held hostage by Iraqi troops after their jet landed in Kuwait the day the Gulf War began. The airline is "entirely responsible" for the unscheduled stop on Aug. 2, 1990, the day Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Paris tribunal said Wednesday. The Iraqis who controlled the airport took the plane's 360 passengers and crew hostage. Some were held for up to three months.

Trying to smooth a case of ruffled feathers, a Superior Court commissioner in Lancaster has ordered a prominent developer to avoid early morning construction work that a nearby resident said was disturbing his flock of ostriches. Commissioner Bertrand Mouron's ruling apparently satisfied Robert Loving of Agua Dulce, who hopes to breed his six ostriches. But an attorney for the developer maintained the order won't change much because, he said, workers were not starting before its 7 a.m.

A state appellate court ordered perjury charges reinstated Tuesday against Steve A. Grasha, former candidate for the Buena Park City Council. Justices of the 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana ruled that enough evidence exists that Grasha falsely claimed residence in Buena Park last year to require him to stand trial for perjury. The unanimous opinion by a three-judge panel of the court reversed an August decision by Superior Court Judge James J. Alfano.

Civil rights attorneys are seeking to overturn two court orders that they contend violate the privacy rights of thousands of Orange County juveniles by allowing schools and law enforcement officials to share confidential records. In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in the 4th District Court of Appeal, the American Civil Liberties Union claims that Orange County Superior Court Judge C. Robert Jameson went beyond his authority when he signed the two orders in March and December of 1989.

The Xerox Corp. on Tuesday obtained a court order seizing federal funds earmarked for Gary Hart's renewed campaign for the presidency to satisfy a debt left from the Colorado Democrat's 1984 campaign. The effect of the ruling by the District of Columbia Superior Court on the transfer of $100,000 in federal campaign funds to Hart, which was approved on Monday, was not clear. The court order to pay off the $10,480 debt to Xerox actually was served on the Federal Election Commission.

Two years after Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer was kicked out of the National Guard for being a lesbian, the highly decorated Vietnam War veteran was back at her old job on Saturday. A federal court ordered her reinstatement last month, ruling that her discharge based on her sexual orientation was unconstitutional. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Thursday refused to delay that order.

The World Court on Friday ordered Burkina Faso and Mali to withdraw their troops from a long-disputed border area and asked them to observe the cease-fire that ended their five-day flare-up last month. Burkina Faso, formerly Upper Volta, had asked the court for an emergency ruling last week, and a hearing was held Thursday. A troop pullout accord "within 20 days . . .

The U.S. Supreme Court told a federal appeals court to take another look at a high-stakes verdict against Honeywell Inc. in its long-running patent-infringement fight against Woodland Hills-based Litton Industries Inc. Honeywell's appeal centered on a challenge to a patent rule known as the doctrine of equivalents, which lets a patent holder get damages from competitors for products or processes that are similar, but not identical, to patented inventions.